Thursday, August 20, 2015

Could this be the most obvious example yet of anti-Israel bias in news reporting?

At roughly the same time today the following two international incidents happened

North Korea fired a shell into South Korea. South Korea responded by firing missiles at where the shell was fired from

Syria (in the form of Iranian backed Islamic Jihad) fired 4 rockets into Israel. Israel responded with artillery fire at where the rockets were launched from.

Clearly these incidents were very similar - a terrorist regime launching an unprovoked attack against its democratic neighbour leading the latter to respond. The only qualitative differences were that

The South Korea response was far more 'disproportionate' (several missiles in response to a single shell) than Israel's (minor artillery shelling in response to 4 rockets)

The attack against Israel was far more serious and newsworthy because it was the most serious attack against Israel from Syria in many years and was authorised and funded by Iran at the very time the world is rewarding Iran with nuclear weapons and the ending of sanctions.

So how did the main stream media report these incidents?

The attack on Israel was almost completely ignored - not a word on the BBC News or even its Middle East News website, while the Korea attack was covered everywhere.

But, more important, look at how the only British newspaper to cover the Israel story (the Financial Times) described it compared to the way the Korea story was covered.